Sunday, September 23, 2012

Quebec City, the historic French settlement, trading post and sometime capitol of New France and Lower Canada, was the birthplace of Rosine Mary Lucile Watson on May 27, 1879. Educated in one of the predominantly Catholic province's many convent schools, Lucile would retain the strong conservative values of her upbringing throughout her life. However, the glamorous and quick-witted young lady would demand more from life than Quebec could offer. She wanted a life on the stage so the teenaged Lucile left her old world behind to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. Lucile was 23 years old when she made her Broadway debut in the 1902 production of Hearts Aflame. For the next 20 years Broadway was her home. Lucile could play anything, but was most popular in the chic comedies of the day. She was a particular favourite of Brooklyn born playwright Clyde Fitch after starring in the 1909 production of his The City.

Lucile Watson, young actress

Sometime during the ragtime period Lucile was briefly married to fellow Canadian actor Rockliffe Fellowes, star of Raoul Walsh's 1915 film Regeneration, whose film career lasted through the 1930s.

Lucile appeared in two plays by Louis Evan Shipman, 1918s The Fountain of Youth and 1922s FoolsErrant. In 1928 at the age of 50, Lucile married the playwright but was sadly widowed five years later when Shipman died in France on his 64th birthday.

During her widowhood Lucile made the most of her acting career continuing to shine on Broadway in such classic roles as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest and Mrs. Bennet in Pride andPrejudice. While a starring comedienne on The Great White Way, the movies generally gave Lucile heavier fare. The overall impression of her cinematic career is one of the dominating, patrician mother. If we look closely at some of these women we find, here and there, a kind heart and a twinkle in the eye. These qualities are abundant in her first credited film role as La Contessa la Brierra in 1934s What Every Woman Knows from the J.M. Barrie play. Helen Hayes as the woman behind the successful politician Brian Aherne would be lost without Lucile's kindness and mentorship.

It is difficult to find something nice to say about Harriet Mason in 1939s Made for Each Other. Perhaps we can feel sorry for the foolishness that causes so much heartbreak in her refusal to accept surprise daughter-in-law Carole Lombard into son James Stewart's life.

Audiences in the 30s and today, like the character Mary Haines in The Women, are shocked by Mrs. Morehead's advice to her daughter to overlook her husband's affair. Yet, she doesn't demand, she offers support. Certainly the advice to watch out for her "friends" was right on the money.

I find no malice in Lady Cronin's treatment of Myra in Waterloo Bridge. She is merely a tool of Fate. A glorious, tear-soaked, heartbreaking Fate.

Watch on the Rhine

George Colouris, Donald Woods (another Canuck), Lucile Watson

Bette Davis, Paul Lukas

In addition to a busy Hollywood career, Broadway still had a firm claim on Lucile Watson. In 1941 she played Fanny Farrelly in the hugely successful Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman. the 1943 Warner Brothers production would bring Lucile and leading man Paul Lukas west to recreate their stage roles. Lukas would win a most well-deserved Best Actor Oscar for his moving performance. Lucile Watson was nominated in the Supporting Actress category as the Washington society maton whose family is intimately impacted by world events. The award that year was given to Katina Paxinou for For Whom the Bell Tolls. The other nominees were Paulette Goddard for So Proudly We Hail and Gladys Cooper and Anne Revere for The Song of Bernadette.

We can add Barbara Stanwyck to the list of Lucile's big-name Hollywood children in 1946s MyReputation. Here we have a genuine generation gap as young widow Jessica Drummond not only has to face small-minded gossips and her disapproving children, but her imperious mother, a woman who has always gotten her way.

The Thin Man Goes Home

Harry Davenport, Lucile Watson

Myrna Loy, William Powell

Lucile continued to be a busy actress. Aunt March in Little Women, the gossipy and very funny aristocrat Princess Bitotska in The Emperor Waltz and facing off against Joan Crawford in Harriet Craig. Would you want anyone else as Nick Charles' mother in The Thin Man Goes Home? Radio anthology programs and talk shows where Lucile Watson could speak her mind. Broadway again as Cornelia Van Gorder in a 1953 revival of Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Bat. Lucile Watson would retire in her 70s remaining in her beloved NYC, passing from this life from a heart attack at age 83.

Some other movies to enjoy with Lucile include Three Smart Girls, Sweethearts, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Rage in Heaven, The Great Lie, Tomorrow is Forever, The Razor's Edge and Julia Misbehaves.

Maude Eburne

November 10, 1875 - October 15, 1960

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players...". We may be the leading lady in our own dramas and comedies, but miss the mark when it comes to public consumption. With her low centre of gravity and non-glamorous features Ontario's Maude Eburne was a born character actress. Now part of the City of Oakville, Bronte-on-the-Lake was a fishing village when Maude was born there in 1875. Currently it is a quick commuter train ride between that spot and Toronto, but it wasn't so convenient in the days of steam and stagecoach. However, Toronto was always a good theatre town and it was the place a determined young woman with an alternately wry and bawdy sense of humour, and elocution lessons under her belt had to go if she wanted to be an actress.

Determination and talent can take you a long way. It can take you from a fishing village in Ontario to the lights of Broadway. Mind you, it was a winding path of stock companies and touring every place in between, but when Maude Eburne hit the big town in 1913 at age 38, she knew how to make 'em laugh and make 'em cry. She would appear in 14 Broadway shows between 1913 and 1930. After all, most plays at that time would call for a maid. One of her successes as Coddles in 1914s A Pair of Sixes would be filmed in 1918.

Along with the jobs and the applause, Maude found time to marry a stage producer named Gene Hill. She was widowed in 1932 as her Hollywood career was beginning and Maude would stay on the west coast the rest of her days.

Maude Eburne's career in pictures was a full and busy time with bona fide film classics interspersed with cult classics, B programmers and uncredited bits. Featured player or bit player, Maude always gave one hundred percent. In 1944s Henry Aldrich Plays Cupid she is billed as "homely woman". Did it rankle or was Maude of the "if you can't fix it, feature it" mind? I prefer her billing in the 1948 western The Plunderers as "Old Dame at Wedding".

The Bat Whispers

Maude Eburne, Grayce Hampton

Lizzie Allen: "I stuck by you when you was a theosophist and a suffragetist. I've seen you through socialism, Fletcherism and rheumatism. But when it comes to spookism I'm through!"

One of Maude's early talkies is 1930s The Bat Whispers, director Roland West's re-do of his 1926 version of Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Bat. As domestic Lizzie Allen to the intrepid Cornelia Van Gorder, who is not afraid of things that go bump in the night, Maude gets to spout sass to Grayce Hampton. She also gets to run around an old dark house in a nightgown with her hair in curl papers making the most ungodly shrieks this side of Una O'Connor.

Classic movie fans can find Maude, along with Lunt and Fontanne, in The Guardsman. She's an incarcerated Madame with a raucous sense of humour in Ladies They Talk About. She's Frank McHugh's chorister mother in the funny ending to Here Comes the Navy. She positively steals the show as Gussie Schnappmann in 1933s The Vampire Bat.

Ruggles of Red Gap

Zazu Pitts, Charles Laughton, Charles Ruggles, Maude Eburne

Just what was it Lincoln said at Gettysburg?

My favourite of Maude Eburne's roles is Ma Pettingill in Leo McCarey's 1935 version of Ruggles of Red Gap. In this story of a third generation valet who has independence thrust upon him Maude's "Ma" is the salt of the earth. Unimaginably wealthy from oil, Ma indulges the snobbish whims of her daughters, but democratically treats all men the same. It is primarily Ma Pettingill's attitude and example that guides Ruggles. She is a dear.

Maude is the housekeeper Mrs. Hastings in the Dr. Christian series starring Jean Hersholt as the fictionalized doctor who delivered the Dionne quintuplet.

The Border Legion

Maude Eburne, "Gabby" Hayes

Honest John Whittaker: "Miss Hurricane, where I come from chivalry is not dead."

Hurricane Hattie McGuire: "Well, in this territory they got it gaspin' for breath!"

Maude had nice roles in three Roy Rogers movies, Colorado, Man from Oklahoma and The BorderLegion. These delightfully paired her with George "Gabby" Hayes with whom she could alternately spar or coyly flirt. Talk about two old pros!

1942s The Boogie Man Will Get You is one of the goofiest movies you'll ever see, and you must see this screwy mash-up of Arsenic and Old Lace meets George Washington Slept Here plus a healthy heaping of wartime propaganda. Impulse shopper Jeff Donnell buys a run-down farm/inn that comes complete with mad scientist Boris Karloff trying to create a Nazi fighting superman. There's also Peter Lorre as a rival doctor with more than a few quirks of his own. Don Beddoe is a flighty choreographer who may be a government agent. Boxer "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom is a powder puff salesman and Frank Puglia a bomb throwing anarchist. In the middle of all this is solicitous landlady Maude Eburne who periodically slips into the belief that she is a chicken about to lay an egg. Cluck. Cluck. I get a great kick out of The Boogie Man Will Get You. I get a kick out of watching some of these really fine actors going for the gold of goofy. I also get a kick out of imagining Maude at the first read-through. "Amelia flaps her arms and clucks like a chicken about to lay an egg. If my elocution teacher could see me now!" Watch her - she's perfect and she's funny. Maude Eburne was always a hundred-percenter. Maude Eburne was a month shy of her 80th birthday when she passed away in 1960.

Some titles to keep on your "look for Maude Eburne list" are Hollywood Cowboy starring George O'Brien, The Amazing Mr. Williams with Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be and The Princess and the Pirate with Bob Hope.

Monday, September 3, 2012

During my formative years as a credit reading television viewer one name above all stood for quality - Fielder Cook. The director of such classic TV movies as Earl Hamner's The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys, A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Will There Really Be a Morning? and more was always prominently featured in the TV Guide Close-Ups of yore. I later learned about that time before my own, the Golden Age of live television and discovered the basis of Mr. Cook's prominence and esteem.

Fielder Cook, Rod Serling

The former naval officer had a degree in literature from Washington and Lee University and studied Elizabethan literature in England, and in 1950 began his career in television with the popular anthology series, Lux Video Theatre. The program, which was a spin-off of NBCs Lux Radio Theater featured original teleplays along with adaptions of popular theatre fare and abridged versions of familiar movie titles. Cook's other credits in those heady days of the 1950s include The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Omnibus, Playhouse 90 and Kraft Television Theatre. The January 12th, 1955 live episode of Kraft Television Theatre was the Cook directed episode of Rod Serling's Patterns starring Richard Kiley, Ed Begley and Everett Sloane. The program's success led to a repeat performance on February 9th and a 1956 theatrical feature directed by Fielder Cook with Van Heflin replacing Kiley. Moving from television to features was a career move made by many of Cook's contemporaries such as Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer and Franklin Schaffner, yet Cook preferred to work in television where the word was king. "I went back to TV because I could do what I wanted to do. You learn from your mistakes
with nobody telling you what to do." In an industry of so-called auteurs, the man was a radical as evidenced by his attitude, "As a director I tell a story, but it's not my story."

One story that gave Fielder Cook a lot of pleasure was a 1962 episode of hour long The DuPont Show of the Week written by Sidney Carroll called Big Deal in Laredo. The story concerns an annual poker game and the high stakes players (Zachary Scott, Roland Winters, John McGiver) whose leisure and life is upended by the involvement of a pioneer couple (Teresa Wright, Walter Matthau). Carroll and Cook, under Cook's own production company Eden Productions Inc. revamped and released a feature presentation of the story renamed A Big Hand for the Little Lady.

If you have seen A Big Hand for the Little Lady, you don't need me to tell you of its many delights. If you have not seen A Big Hand for the Little Lady, you don't want me to tell you too much of the delights awaiting you. Trust me on this, if on nothing else, the discovery is a joyful one you will want to make on your own. As a bit of an incentive I will mention that the cast feature a diverse collection of familiar and fabled actors including Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bickford, Paul Ford, Burgess Meredith, Kevin McCarthy, Robert Middleton and John Qualen. The "little lady" in question is the mesmerizing Joanne Woodward. Ms. Woodward was nominated for a Laurel Award from the Motion Picture Exhibitors in the category of Female Comedy Performance. The award was given to Julie Andrews of Thoroughly ModernMillie and one of the other nominees was Shirley MacLaine for Gambit which was also based on a Sidney Carroll. The script for A Big Hand for the Little Lady is funny, exciting, moving and very, very real.

TCM is showing A Big Hand for the Little Lady on Saturday, September 8 at 6:00 pm. I sincerely hope you find it a convenient time.